East Valley educators: State must support new standards

Craig Barrett, chairman of Gov. Jan Brewer's education council, faced a tough audience when he addressed Southeast Valley educators about the new Arizona Common Core Standards last week.

Barrett, the former CEO and chairman of Intel Corp., told 45 educators ranging from classroom teachers to superintendents and school-board members that the new education standards, which emphasize reasoning and problem solving instead of memorization of facts formulas, could be the most important change in Arizona classrooms in decades.

But a number of educators wanted to know how Brewer and the Arizona Department of Education intend for schools to pay for new classroom materials and teacher time to develop new curricula.

"The question is 'Do we have the resources in place currently to succeed with this?' " asked Mike Hughes, a member of the Mesa Public Schools governing board and president of the Arizona School Board Association.

Camille Casteel, superintendent of the Chandler Unified School District, estimated it would cost her district at least $1 million to train teachers to use the new standards in their classrooms. Part of the expense, she explained, is the cost of substitute teachers that need to be hired on days when classroom teachers attend trainings.

"It's a good concept, but it would be nice to have some support behind it," she said. "We are not talking about just training 15 teachers. In the East Valley, there are probably 15,000 teachers."

Arizona is one of 46 states to have adopted the new standards, which beef up math and English language requirements for students in kindergarten through Grade 12.

The Arizona State Board of Education adopted the standards in 2010. School districts have until the spring of 2015 to prepare students for a challenging new assessment, called the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers -- or PARCC, that will replace Arizona's AIMS test.

The new standards require math students, for instance, to do more than just memorize formulas and facts for multiple-choice tests. They will need to be able to write out the reasons for the strategies they use to solve problems.

And language students won't simply learn grammar rules and vocabulary words. They will need to demonstrate that they can use language to write persuasive essays.

"I think this could be one of the biggest improvements to education that this country has ever seen," said Barrett, who as chairman of Brewer's Arizona Ready education council has been meeting with educators around the state to talk about the new standards.

Barrett noted that the standards should help students in Arizona better compete internationally.

"As Americans, we have gotten complacent in that we just compare our academic performance to the adjacent state or the adjacent school district," he said.

"But it's the kids in Europe, the kids in Asia and the kids in Latin America that they are going to have to compete with."

Barrett told the audience that there were no easy answers to the funding questions. Arizona has not allocated funds to individual school districts for teacher training in the Common Core.

Instead, the Arizona Department of Education is providing webinars, instructional videos and other tools for teachers who are converting their classroom curricula to the Common Core, said department spokeswoman Molly Edwards. The department also has trained 300 teachers to train others in their regions, she said.